Pieter A. Olivier

The ASF+SDF Meta-environment: A Component-Based Language Development Environment

The Asf+Sdf Meta-environment is an interactive development environment for the automatic generation of interactive systems for constructing language definitions and generating tools for them. Over the years, this system has been used in a variety of academic and commercial projects ranging from formal program manipulation to conversion of COBOL systems. Since the existing implementation of the Meta-environment started exhibiting more and more characteristics of a legacy system, we decided to build a completely new, component-based, version. We demonstrate this new system and stress its open architecture.

The Asf+Sdf Meta-Environment: A Component-Based Language Development Environment

Abstract The A sf +S df Meta-Environment is an interactive development environment for the automatic generation of interactive systems for constructing language definitions and generating tools for them. Over the years, this system has been used in a variety of academic and commercial projects ranging from formal program manipulation to conversion of COBOL systems. Since the existing implementation of the Meta-Environment started exhibiting more and more characteristics of a legacy system, we decided to build a completely new, component-based, version. We demonstrate this new system and stress its open architecture.

TIDE: A Generic Debugging Framework --- Tool Demonstration ---

A language specific interactive debugger is one of the tools that we expect in any mature programming environment. We present applications of TIDE: a generic debugging framework that is related to the ASF+SDF Meta-Environment. TIDE can be applied to different levels of debugging that occur in language design. Firstly, TIDE was used to obtain a full-fledged debugger for language specifications based on term rewriting. Secondly, TIDE can be instantiated for any other programming language, including but not limited to domain specific languages that are defined and implemented using ASF+SDF. We demonstrate the common debugging interface, and indicate the amount of effort needed to instantiate new debuggers based on TIDE.

A Simulator Framework for Embedded Systems

We have developed a flexible and intuitive simulator for embedded systems stable enough to be used in a commercial setting, with an execution speed comparable to that of the simulated hardware. This extensible simulator is based on a loosely coupled set of tools that form a framework for efficient construction of new simulators.

Debugging Distributed Applications Using a Coordination Architecture

Most distributed systems consist of a number of sequential processes running in parallel. We present a language-independent debugging framework for the debugging of these distributed systems. Over the years, a lot of effort has been invested in the construction of debuggers for sequential programs. The majority of these debuggers work by abstracting the behaviour of the program being debugged into events, and visualizing these events. We utilize these sequential debuggers to generate language-independent debugging events about the sequential execution of the processes in the distributed system. The underlying coordination architecture is used to generate debugging events dealing with the interaction between processes. These sequential and process interaction related debugging events are then processed by a separate distributed system that implements the high-level language-independent debugging functionality. We also present a powerful multilingual distributed debugger based on our framework.